Himeros
by Estoma
Summary: They're both children playing grown-up games.


**Author's note: ****For Paige, on her birthday. I know it's not quite Katniss/Finnick, but I hope you'll like it anyway.**

**Prompt: Bronze, the Colour Challenge, also, 'You can't describe the characters emotions, just their appearance, movements and dialogue.' Caesar's Palace forum.**

**Warning: Underage prostitution.**

_i._

It begins in a muddy schoolyard, littered with children clinging to their parents like vines on a trellis, the air redolent with the forlorn whimpers of those abandoned already. Oil and water; the Seam and merchant youngsters do not mix.

"See that little boy?" Mrs Everdeen says, bending down to point out the child with his face nuzzled in his father's flour-dusted apron. "I wanted to marry his daddy, but he picked a cook instead."

"Why wouldn't he pick you?" Wide eyed, Katniss is young enough to believe her mother could reach up and pluck the stars like flowers, and string them in her hair.

"Because when she was cooking, you couldn't help but stop and breathe it in."

_ii._

As so many stories do, his begins on Reaping Day when his name is pulled from the glass bowl and offered up in the escort's talons, like a sacrifice to the cruel gods who ruled before the Dark Days. Perhaps to Ares, god of war, or the Algea, the spirits of pain and suffering. He knows that flashing-eyed Athena who would guide lost ships home with her mighty spear held out to ward off serpents and Cyclops, would never demand such a price. The wall of sweaty, tanned flesh parts and young Finnick Odair mounts the stage on lanky, coltish legs and covers his roiling gut with a queasy smile. He looks over the heads of the crowd to the beach and swallows the bile that rises in his throat. The whitecaps froth like milk, while below, the sea boils like the pits of hell. The Capitol swoons over the faraway look in his eye

_iii._

The gnarled, old apple tree nearly becomes her grave. Rivulets of muddy water, like tea steeped too long with too little milk, trickle around the roots of the tree and her prone limbs. Heavy drops of rain fall with cruel indifference and force her fragile body further into the dark mud. With the warmth and light of the stoves only a stone's throw away and the scent of yeast on the moist air, her eyes flutter shut.

_iv._

None of the water is safe; there is a gut wrenching poison that no amount of boiling will purge. The lake, the stream, the trickling waterfalls that tumble between the rusty rocks; there's a sickness in them, from before the Dark Days, resurrected using funds that could have found a cure for influenza. Finnick sees three tributes; three strong chances and three allies, curled on the parched ground as their guts contort, fester and bleed. He has only to glance up and smile before the sky opens and a silver parachute falls; rain, just for him.

_v._

An instinct grows deep in her gut, and it pulls her heavy eyelids up and gathers her thin legs beneath her. It's a cruel, animal reaction, buried deep in her tangled DNA; a relic from simpler times. It growls and tugs and bays her to ignore her aching joints and the weakness in her fragile bones. It's almost as strong as the single, bright image Katniss clings to, kept safe between her ribs and glowing like a candle flame; Prim.

_vi._

After six days of watching tributes die, writhing in their own shit and vomit, the Capitol audience is baying for blood. This time, the sky divulges salvation for Finnick in another form. He is not a sacrifice now; he has the Keres by his side and she urges him on as he sends broken soul after broken soul to her father's waiting arms. With that same queasy smile that has the sponsors lining up on the marble plaza, Finnick takes the trident and paints the tines red.

_vii._

At eleven years and eleven months old, the burden of breadwinner falls squarely on the thin shoulders of Katniss Everdeen. The weight of it pushes her further into the ground and gives her back a slump and her fingers a restless, hungry twitch. At eleven years and eleven months old, Katniss Everdeen will do anything and everything to keep her little candle from guttering and drowning in the wax. She is obliged to help the ghost-figure that is her mother, too. So, following the growling pull in her gut, her spindly legs take her to the square brick house behind the peacekeepers' barracks.

_viii._

Finnick looks older than fourteen years. In the arena, the baby fat melts from his lean bones and there are sharp angles to his face that shouldn't have developed yet. At fourteen, nearly fifteen years old, he hauls on the dangling rope of his net and _smiles_ as the lanky girl from District 1 screams. Joints distort and limbs fold, the rough fibre of the native fig vine bites into her flesh. Finnick trusses her up like a groosling and ends the 65th Hunger Games with his trident, tines wedged between her ribs. The gamemakers have to snap bone to retrieve it. At fourteen, he can nearly pass for a man until his toilworn smile flashes onto the screens and there's a dimple on his right cheek and a whisker of a gap between his front teeth.

_ix._

Her virginity, or as Cray puts it, 'the thing between her legs' is worth nine coins. It would have been ten if she hadn't struggled as he shoved two fingers _inside _her. Nine coins, an eye swollen and bruised shut and an ache in her stomach. She wears a cloth between her legs when she gets home, but the next day, Cray doesn't mind that there's still a little blood. Her makes Katniss lick it off him when he's done.

_x._

Five days after the games end, the blood and scars are scoured from his skin and they give him a new one, satin smooth. The callouses on the pads of his fingers are put back in place so nobody can forget he was a district boy first. He's delivered to his client's doorstep with Snow's threats hanging from his wrists like manacles. Parcelled up in a sea green blazer and slacks that are made for someone smaller, he's just ready to be unwrapped. Finnick's first time passes with the surveillance shots of his brothers building turreted castles in the grainy sand, hovering in the back of his mind. Snow makes it seem as if Finnick has a choice. It's a sadistic joke.

_xi._

Cray's coins keep them in grain and oil for a week. Katniss cooks the unhulled wheat to a rough mush with a little salt and shares it out with Prim and the ghost-woman by the stove. Most of it goes to Prim. The bruise that colours deep purple, then sickly yellow, keeping her eye shut for two days, is all for Katniss. She says she tripped and lets Prim play nurse. But when the oil runs out and the lamps burn low, the shadows creep out from the corners of the room and she goes back to Cray. The sickest thing is that he acts like she chooses to spread her legs for him.

_xii._

Finnick does it for his parents on their little wooden boat with sails orange as the sunset. When he isn't allowed home for the Summer Solstice festival, when all the boats; yachts, trawlers and skiffs, take to the water for the longest day, he knows that at least the orange sails will not disappear beneath the water.

_xiii._

She does it for Prim.

_xiv._

He starts off with Elizza Templesmith, and though her sweaty hands leave marks on his skin like the suckers of one of the colourful octopus in the tide pools, she doesn't hurt him. The night ends and Finnick trembles and drags himself to the sleek, black car, but at least he is not bleeding. Not everyone is gentle. Finnick soon learns that Flickerman likes to inflict pain. Crane prefers to watch.

_xv._

At first Cray's the only one. He sees her twice a week and sometimes gives her a hot bath first if she looks particularly greasy when she knocks at the backdoor. Katniss thinks he's the only one perverted enough to buy her. Turns out he's not. By the time she's fourteen, the alleys behind the merchants' houses become her beat and she knows most of the husbands. Sammeth Cartwright will re-sole Prim's boots for no extra cost if she lets him take her from the back. Old Davy Brenna gives her all his off cuts of cotton if she'll lie beside him and rest her head on his chest when they're done. There's a lesson in skinning her game and sharpening knives from Tate Anderal, the butcher, once she realises he likes her to be noisy. She never knocks on the baker's door.

_xvi._

Finnick knows everyone who is rich enough to have a house in the first three circles of the inner city. He's an unwilling guest to their parties, or to their beds. There's Crane, who often books two victors at a time, so there's three bodies, thrashing and tangled in the bed; male or female, it doesn't matter. Flickerman bends Finnick over a table and he leaves with rope burn from the rough, hessian cord. Without the powdered wig, Flickerman is a demon. Nyssa is married to Terry Sheer, the gamemaker responsible for the razor sharp coastal grass that gave Finnick his first scar in the arena. He left a blood trail when he waded through the estuary, drawing the red-eyed, splay-legged mutts with their thick, armoured scales. She asks him to wear her husband's clothes. They all act like they know him, inside and out.

_xvii._

Behind the slagheap is a sheltered spot that the young people frequent, especially before the Reaping. For a coin or two, Katniss gets on her knees for the undertaker's son, for Delly Cartwright's older brother, and once, for Peeta Mellark. He is all golden curls and pale skin-between his legs, too. Katniss smiles at the way her dark Seam hands look on his strawberries and cream skin. Sometimes she does it for Gale Hawthorne behind the slagheap, other times in the woods, but she doesn't take coins from him. Occasionally, he gives her the bigger half of the bread roll he'll trade for, or an extra trout from the traps in the peaceful lake.

_xviii._

Naked and bronzed, Finnick's body is splashed across the Capitol on posters, billboards and the sticky pages of _Victors: Uncut. _

_xix._

By the time she is sixteen years old, Katniss Everdeen has picked up a trick or two. She still goes to Cray every week and while there's a few more grey hairs on his chest, she no longer shivers or cries when he touches her. Afterwards, she doesn't need to scrub herself.

"You always give Olive Henders eleven coins. I'm worth eleven."

"She's a proper fucking woman. Does stuff, doesn't just lie there like she's dead."

Katniss circles her tongue across her wet, pink lips. "I'll prove I'm worth eleven."

Sometimes, there's enough grain in the barrel, oil in the pot, and nobody's coat is wearing through at the elbows, but she still hangs around the slagheap.

_xx._

Finnick doesn't fish for gifts anymore. Using his body as a lure, he lets the barbed hooks sink into his flesh and lodge there, beneath his ribs. And now, as he lands the biggest prizes, it's about something more than orange sails and Annie Cresta's tangled, chestnut hair.

_xxi._

And then Katniss volunteers.

_xxii._

There is the faint hint of smoke on the air. From District 2's rust-brown mountains, to 4's beaches, and the rice paddies of 11, everyone knows that there's no smoke without a flame.


End file.
